A Report on the Surveillance Society
efforts to co-ordinate, and to develop Electronic Patient Records (EPR), moving ultimately towards a comprehensive national digital database of all personal health records. The NHS ‘spine’ of data on each patient63 is at the centre of the NHS Care Records Service, containing a limited amount of essential information that can be combined with a larger amount of locally-held care information. In addition, the programme involves national databases with patient records supplied by local NHS bodies, including data on notifiable diseases and information held for clinical audit. Pathology and other test records can be filed electronically. Plans and partial developments also include booking appointments, prescriptions, electronic transfer of patients’ records between GP practices, and other functions. EPRs are held and transferred securely, for they are encrypted with a public-key system, and are subject to rules that allow personnel in each NHS function to look at only those data that are relevant to that function. There have been some local pilot schemes in which patients manage their own records through the use of smart cards.
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9.6.8.
Databases are also crucial in law enforcement. Some two million people a year are arrested by the police in England and Wales. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 empowered the police to take fingerprint impressions and DNA samples from all arrestees with the records remaining on police databases and accessible via the police national computer regardless of guilt or innocence. The database of fingerprints now contains nearly 6 million sets of prints and automated matching is almost instantaneous.64 The National DNA Database was set up in 1995, has expanded so that ‘virtually the entire active criminal population would be recorded on the database’ by 2005.65 In December 2005 the database held profiles on 3.45 million individuals, roughly 5.2% of the total population. Nearly 40% of black males are now profiled on the database compared with 9% of white and 13% of Asian males.66 The Drugs Act of 2005, which became operational in March 2006, gave the police the power to drug test all people arrested for certain trigger offences, including theft, robbery, burglary and begging, again regardless of guilt.
9.6.9.
The heart of the police IT infrastructure is the Police National Computer (PNC). The PNC holds a range of databases and provides the ability to read external databases such as the register of drivers held by the DVLC and is now linked to more than 30,000 terminals across the country. The last decade has seen the PNC moving from being an electronic filing cabinet to a fully-fledged intelligence tool in its own right with the ability to search across any of the fields.67 It is now augmented by ANPR, the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) and the Violent Offender and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR), which provides police and probation with a shared national database that contains an expanded set of information on offenders, including personal details, descriptive details, behavioural traits, details of risk assessment, intelligence reports, an activity log and a photographic library68. The most recent initiatives has been a project to develop a Facial Images National Database (FIND), to be fully operational by 2009, cross-referenced to
NHS Connecting for Health (2006) ‘Spine’, http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/delivery/programmes/spine . PITO (Police Information Technology Organisation) (2005) Annual Report 2004 – 2005, HC 261, London Stationery Office. 65 FSPU (Forensic Science and Pathology Unit) (2005) DNA Expansion Programme 2000-2005: Reporting Achievement. London Home Office:3, Postnote 200. 66 Randerson, J., ‘DNA of 37% of black men held by police’, The Guardian, 5 January 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1678168,00.html . 67 ibid. 68 PITO (2004) ‘Memorandum by the Police Information Technology Organisation to the Bichard Inquiry’, http://www.bichardinquiry.org.uk.edgesuite.net/10663/full_evidence/0018/00180001.pdf . 64
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